Recent improvements in speech recognition algorithms and hardware have made it possible to develop speaker-trained speech recognition systems that can be used in consumer and small business products. The vast majority of users in this market have no experience with speech recognition systems and, hence, don't understand how to use these systems to obtain the best performance. One problem which causes degraded performance in a speaker-trained speech recognizer is the selection of the vocabulary to be recognized. For example, if the user (i.e., speaker) selects two words that are acoustically similar, such as "Larry" and "Barry", the recognizer will likely have trouble distinguishing them. What is desired is a speaker-trained speech recognition system which indicates to the speaker when vocabulary words are confusingly similar to the system.